Literary and General Lectures and Essays

by Charles Kingsley

(6) Believes that eternity may thus be realised in time;

(7) Has its mythical miraculous pretensions, i.e. its theurgic department;

(8) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide—his Guru.

Against the two latter articles we except. The theurgic department of Mysticism—unfortunately but too common—seems to us always to have been (as it certainly was in neo-Platonism) the despairing return to that ceremonialism which it had begun by shaking off, when it was disappointed in reaching its high aim by its proper method. The use of the Guru, or Father Confessor (which Mr. Vaughan confesses to be inconsistent with Mysticism), is to be explained in the same way—he is a last refuge after disappointment.

But as for the first six counts. Is the Hindoo mystic a worse or a better man for holding them? Are they on the whole right or wrong? Is not disinterested love nobler than a mercenary religion? Is it not right to protest against ceremonial prescriptions, and to say, with the later prophets and psalmists of the Jews: “Thinkest thou that He will eat bull’s flesh, and drink the blood of goats. Sacrifice and burnt-offering Thou wouldst not . . . I come to do thy will, O God!” What is, even, if he will look calmly into it, the “pantheistic identification of subject and object, worshipper and worshipped,” but the clumsy yet honest effort of the human mind to say to itself: “Doing God’s will is the real end and aim of man?” The Yogi looks round upon his fellow-men, and sees that all their misery and shame come from self-will; he looks within, and finds that all which makes him miserable, angry, lustful, greedy after this and that, comes from the same self-will. And he asks himself: How shall I escape from this torment of self?—how shall I tame my wayward will, till it shall become one with the harmonious, beautiful, and absolute Will which made all things? At least I will try to do it, whatever it shall cost me. I will give up all for which men live—wife and child, the sights, scents, sounds of this fair earth, all things, whatever they be, which men call enjoyment; I will make this life one long torture, if need be; but this rebel will of mine I will conquer. I ask for no reward. That may come in some future life. But what care I? I am now miserable by reason of the lusts which war in my members; the peace which I shall gain in being freed from them will be its own reward. After all I give up little. All those things round me—the primeval forest, and the sacred stream of Ganga, the mighty Himalaya, mount of God, ay, the illimitable vault of heaven above me, sun and stars—what are they but “such stuff as dreams are made of”? Brahm thought, and they became something and somewhere. He may think again, and they will become nothing and nowhere. Are these eternal, greater than I, worth troubling my mind about? Nothing is eternal, but the Thought which made them, and will unmake them. They are only venerable in my eyes, because each of them is a thought of Brahm’s. And I too have thought; I alone of all the kinds of living things. Am I not, then, akin to God? what better for me than to sit down and think, as Brahm thinks, and so enjoy my eternal heritage, leaving for those who cannot think the passions and pleasures which they share in common with the beasts of the field? So I shall become more and more like Brahm—will his will, think his thoughts, till I lose utterly this house-fiend of self, and become one with God.

Is this a man to be despised? Is he a sickly dreamer, or a too valiant hero? and if any one be shocked at this last utterance, let him consider carefully the words which he may hear on Sunday: “Then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us.” That belief is surely not a false one. Shall we abhor the Yogi because he has seen, sitting alone there amid idolatry and licentiousness, despotism and priestcraft, that the ideal goal of man is what we confess it to be in the communion service? Shall we not rather wonder and rejoice over the magnificent utterance in that Bhagavat-Gita which Mr. Vaughan takes for the text-book of Hindoo Mysticism, where Krishna, the teacher human, and yet God himself, speaks thus:

There is nothing greater than I; all things hang on me, as precious gems upon a string. . . . . I am life in all things, and zeal in the zealous. I am the eternal seed of nature: I am the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong, free from lust and anger. . . . Those who trust in me know Brahm, the supreme and incorruptible. . . . . In this body I am the teacher of worship. He who thinks of me will find me. He who finds me returns not again to mortal birth. . . . . I am the sacrifice, I am the worship, I am the incense, I am the fire, I am the victim, I am the father and mother of the world; I am the road of the good, the comforter, the creator, the witness, the asylum, and the friend. They who serve other Gods with a firm belief, involuntarily worship me. I am the same to all mankind. They who serve me in adoration are in me. If one whose ways are ever so evil serve me alone, he becometh of a virtuous spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness. Even women, and the tribes of Visya and Soodra, shall go the supreme journey if they take sanctuary with me; how much more my holy servants the Brahmins and the Ragarshees! Consider this world as a finite and joyless place, and serve me.

There may be confused words scattered up and down here; there are still more confused words—not immoral ones—round them, which we have omitted; but we ask, once and for all, is this true, or is it not? Is there a being who answers to this description, or is there not? And if there be, was it not a light price to pay for the discovery of Him “to sit upon the sacred grass called koos, with his mind fixed on one object alone; keeping his head, neck, and body steady, without motion; his eyes fixed upon the point of his nose, looking at no other place around”—or any other simple, even childish, practical means of getting rid of the disturbing bustle and noise of the outward time-world, that he might see the eternal world which underlies it? What if the discovery be imperfect, the figure in many features erroneous? Is not the wonder to us, the honour to him, that the figure should be there at all? Inexplicable to us on any ground, save that one common to the Bhagavat-Gita, to the gospel. “He who seeks me shall find me.” What if he knew but in part, and saw through a glass darkly? Was there not an inspired apostle, who could but say the very same thing of himself, and look forward to a future life in which he would “know even as he was known”?

It is well worth observing too, that so far from the moral of this Bhagavat-Gita issuing in mere contemplative Quietism, its purpose is essentially practical. It arises out of Arjoun’s doubt whether he shall join in the battle which he sees raging below him; it results in his being commanded to join in it, and fight like a man. We cannot see, as Mr. Vaughan does, an “unholy indifference” in the moral. Arjoun shrinks from fighting because friends and relatives are engaged on both sides, and he dreads hell if he kills one of them. The answer to his doubt is, after all, the only one which makes war permissible to a Christian, who looks on all men as his brothers:

“You are a Ksahtree, a soldier; your duty is to fight. Do your duty, and leave the consequences of it to him who commanded the duty. You cannot kill these men’s souls any more than they can yours. You can only kill their mortal bodies; the fate of their souls and yours depends on their moral state. Kill their bodies, then, if it be your duty, instead of tormenting yourself with scruples, which are not really scruples of conscience, only selfish fears of harm to yourself, and leave their souls to the care of Him who made them, and knows them, and cares more for them than you do.”